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Hallucination continues to pose a major obstacle in the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Although the Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) paradigm offers a promising solution by promoting consensus among multiple agents to enhance reliability, it relies on the unrealistic assumption that all debaters are rational and reflective, which is a condition that may not hold when agents themselves are prone to hallucinations. To address this gap, we introduce the Multi-agent Undercover Gaming (MUG) protocol, inspired by social deduction games like ``Who is Undercover?&#39;&#39;. MUG reframes MAD as a process of detecting ``undercover&#39;&#39; agents (those suffering from hallucinations) by employing multimodal counterfactual tests. Specifically, we modify reference images to introduce counterfactual evidence and observe whether agents can accurately identify these changes, providing ground-truth for identifying hallucinating agents and enabling robust, crowd-powered multimodal reasoning. MUG advances MAD protocols along three key dimensions: (1) enabling factual verification beyond statistical consensus through counterfactual testing; (2) introducing cross-evidence reasoning via dynamically modified evidence sources instead of relying on static inputs; and (3) fostering active reasoning, where agents engage in probing discussions rather than passively answering questions. Collectively, these innovations offer a more reliable and effective framework for multimodal reasoning in LLMs.

AAAI 2026

Multi-Agent Undercover Gaming: Hallucination Removal Through Counterfactual Test for Multimodal Reasoning

Hallucination continues to pose a major obstacle in the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Although the Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) paradigm offers a promising solution by promoting consensus among multiple agents to enhance reliability, it relies on the unrealistic assumption that all debaters are rational and reflective, which is a condition that may not hold when agents themselves are prone to hallucinations. To address this gap, we introduce the Multi-agent Undercover Gaming (MUG) protocol, inspired by social deduction games like ``Who is Undercover?''. MUG reframes MAD as a process of detecting ``undercover'' agents (those suffering from hallucinations) by employing multimodal counterfactual tests. Specifically, we modify reference images to introduce counterfactual evidence and observe whether agents can accurately identify these changes, providing ground-truth for identifying hallucinating agents and enabling robust, crowd-powered multimodal reasoning. MUG advances MAD protocols along three key dimensions: (1) enabling factual verification beyond statistical consensus through counterfactual testing; (2) introducing cross-evidence reasoning via dynamically modified evidence sources instead of relying on static inputs; and (3) fostering active reasoning, where agents engage in probing discussions rather than passively answering questions. Collectively, these innovations offer a more reliable and effective framework for multimodal reasoning in LLMs.

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We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-26 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.<br><br>

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We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

Simulating microstructure evolution (MicroEvo) is vital for materials design but demands high numerical accuracy, efficiency, and physical fidelity. Although recent studies on deep learning (DL) offers a promising alternative to traditional solvers, the field lacks standardized benchmarks. Existing studies are flawed due to a lack of comparing specialized MicroEvo DL models with state-of-the-art spatio-temporal architectures, an overemphasis on numerical accuracy over physical fidelity, and a failure to analyze error propagation over time.
To address these gaps, we introduce MicroEvoEval, the first comprehensive benchmark for image-based microstructure evolution prediction. We evaluate 14 models, encompassing both domain-specific and general-purpose architectures, across four representative MicroEvo tasks with datasets specifically structured for both short- and long-term assessment. Our multi-faceted evaluation framework goes beyond numerical accuracy and computational cost, incorporating a curated set of structure-preserving metrics to assess physical fidelity. Our extensive evaluations yield several key insights. Notably, we find that modern architectures (e.g., VMamba), not only achieve superior long-term stability and physical fidelity but also operate with an order-of-magnitude greater computational efficiency. The results highlight the necessity of holistic evaluation and identify these modern architectures as a highly promising direction for developing efficient and reliable surrogate models in data-driven materials science.

MicroEvoEval: A Systematic Evaluation Framework for Image-Based Microstructure Evolution Prediction

The success of diffusion models has raised concerns about the generation of unsafe or harmful content, prompting concept erasure approaches that fine-tune modules to suppress specific concepts while preserving general generative capabilities. However, as the number of erased concepts grows, these methods often become inefficient and ineffective, since each concept requires a separate set of fine-tuned parameters and may degrade the overall generation quality. In this work, we propose a supertype-subtype concept hierarchy that organizes erased concepts into a parent–child structure. Each erased concept is treated as a child node, and semantically related concepts (*e.g.*, macaw, and bald eagle) are grouped under a shared parent node, referred to as a supertype concept (*e.g.*, bird). Rather than erasing concepts individually, we introduce an effective and efficient group-wise suppression method, where semantically similar concepts are grouped and erased jointly by sharing a single set of learnable parameters. During the erasure phase, standard diffusion regularization is applied to preserve denoising process in unmasked regions. To mitigate the degradation of supertype generation caused by excessive erasure of semantically related subtypes, we propose a novel method called **Su**pertype-**P**reserving **Lo**w-**R**ank **A**daptation (SuPLoRA), which encodes the supertype concept information in the frozen down-projection matrix and updates only the up-projection matrix during erasure. Theoretical analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of SuPLoRA in mitigating generation performance degradation. We construct a more challenging benchmark that requires simultaneous erasure of concepts across diverse domains, including celebrities, objects, and pornographic content. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves a superior balance between effective multi-concept erasure and the preservation of desirable generative performance.

Mass Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models with Concept Hierarchy

We study the problem of solving one-sided, zero-sum, partially observable stochastic games (POSGs). These games model sequential interactions between two adversaries, where one player has partial observability of the game state. They are applicable to many important domains, such as robotics and cybersecurity. Solving such games is computationally challenging since the solution depends on the first player's belief about the game state, which belongs to a continuous (and often high-dimensional) belief space. In the literature, only a single method has demonstrated reliable performance for solving these types of games, namely Heuristic Search Value Iteration (HSVI). However, this method is restricted to small games. We address this limitation by presenting a new method with similar approximation and convergence guarantees but improved scalability and flexibility, which we call SAB: Shapley iteration with Aggregated Beliefs. Our method aggregates the belief space into a finite set of representative beliefs and computes their values through Shapley iteration. It then approximates the value function of the POSG through interpolation from these values. We prove that SAB converges and provide a bound on its approximation error. Experiments across several benchmark games show that SAB matches the performance of HSVI on small game instances while also scaling to larger games. Moreover, we find that SAB is up to 79% faster than HSVI at obtaining a near-optimal approximation.

Scalable Solutions to Zero-Sum Partially Observable Stochastic Games Through Belief Aggregation with Approximation Guarantees

Online planning in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) enables agents to make sequential decisions by simulating future trajectories from the current state, making it well-suited for large-scale or dynamic environments. Sample-based methods such as Sparse Sampling and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) are widely adopted for their ability to approximate optimal actions using a generative model. However, in practical settings, the generative model is often learned from limited data, introducing approximation errors that can degrade performance or lead to unsafe behaviors. To address these challenges, Robust MDPs (RMDPs) offer a principled framework for planning under model uncertainty, yet existing approaches are typically computationally intensive and not suited for real-time use. In this work, we introduce Robust Sparse Sampling (RSS), the first online planning algorithm for RMDPs with finite-sample theoretical performance guarantees. Unlike Sparse Sampling, which estimates the nominal value function, RSS computes a robust value function by leveraging the efficiency and theoretical properties of Sample Average Approximation (SAA), enabling tractable robust policy computation in online settings. RSS is applicable to infinite or continuous state spaces, and its sample and computational complexities are independent of the state space size. We provide theoretical performance guarantees and empirically show that RSS outperforms standard Sparse Sampling in environments with uncertain dynamics.

Online Robust Planning Under Model Uncertainty: A Sample-Based Approach

Hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs), defined as the generation of content inconsistent with facts or context, represent a core obstacle to their reliable deployment in critical domains.
Current research primarily focuses on binary "detection" approaches that, while capable of identifying hallucinations, fail to provide interpretable and actionable feedback for model improvement, thus limiting practical utility.
To address this limitation, a new research paradigm is proposed, shifting from "detection" to "diagnosis". The Hallucination Diagnosis Task is introduced, a task which requires models to not only detect hallucinations, but also perform error localization, causal explanation, and content correction.
We develop the Hallucination Diagnosis Generator (HDG), an automated pipeline that systematically generates high-quality training samples with rich diagnostic metadata from raw corpora through multi-dimensional augmentation strategies including controlled fact fabrication and reasoning chain perturbation.
Using HDG-generated data, we train HDM-4B-RL, a 4-billion-parameter hallucination diagnosis model, employing Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a comprehensive reward function incorporating structural, accuracy, and localization signals.
Experimental results demonstrate that our model surpasses previous state-of-the-art detection models on the HaluEval benchmark while achieving comparable performance to advanced general-purpose models.
In comprehensive diagnosis tasks, HDM-4B-RL matches the capabilities of larger general models while maintaining smaller size.
This work validates the feasibility and value of hallucination diagnosis, providing an effective methodology for building more trustworthy and reliable generative AI systems.

From Detection to Diagnosis: Advancing Hallucination Analysis with Automated Data Synthesis

Just recognizable distortion (JRD) has emerged as a promising paradigm for machine-centric video coding. However, existing JRD-guided coding methods are limited by coarse annotation granularity and high computational cost, which hinder their deployment. In this paper, we first investigate the impact of different JRD annotation strategies on downstream task performance. By incorporating both instance-level and contextual information, we construct a new JRD dataset with fine-grained annotations compatible with object detection and instance segmentation tasks. To enhance quantization parameter (QP) map prediction while maintaining computational efficiency, we propose a novel spiking neural network (SNN)-based framework that decomposes video frames into spatial structures, channel interactions, and temporal patterns. Furthermore, we introduce a spiking attention mechanism to aggregate task-relevant features and employ adaptive scaling vectors to suppress machine-perceived redundancy, enabling targeted bitrate allocation aligned with task-critical content. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets and backbones demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art codec-based and JRD-guided methods in maintaining task performance at ultra-low bitrates, while significantly reducing computational overhead.

Firing Bits Where It Matters: Spiking-Guided Just Recognizable Distortion Modeling for Machine-Centric Video Coding

Estimating counterfactual outcomes from observational data is critical for informed decision-making in domains such as personalized marketing, healthcare, and online platforms. In these contexts, decision processes frequently involve high-dimensional combinatorial interventions, including bundled channel allocation or product set recommendations. For such scenarios, both causal assessment of historical strategies and optimization of novel interventions necessitate models capable of extrapolating to intervention combinations that are underrepresented or entirely absent in observational data. Specifically, in digital marketing, companies often need to evaluate new combinations of channels or target emerging user segments that have not been previously exposed. Moreover, inherent biases in observational datasets, stemming from prior allocation policies and targeting mechanisms, further aggravate coverage sparsity and compromise off-support counterfactual inference. In this work, we propose Dual-Source Counterfactual Fusion (DSCF), a scalable framework that enables accurate counterfactual prediction under high-dimensional combinatorial interventions, with improved robustness to confounding bias. DSCF jointly models observational data and proxy counterfactual samples through a dual-head mixture-of-experts architecture and domain-guided fusion. This design effectively integrates bias reduction and information diversity while enabling adaptive generalization to counterfactual inputs. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and semi-synthetic datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of DSCF across diverse scenarios.

DSCF: Dual-Source Counterfactual Fusion for High-Dimensional Combinatorial Interventions

Transformers are the basis of modern large language models, but relatively little is known about their precise expressive power on graphs. We study the expressive power of graph transformers (GTs) by Dwivedi and Bresson (2020) and GPS-networks by Rampásek et al. (2022), both under soft-attention and average hard-attention. Our study covers two scenarios: the theoretical setting with real numbers and the more practical case with floats. With reals, we show that in restriction to vertex properties definable in first-order logic (FO), GPS-networks have the same expressive power as graded modal logic (GML) with the global modality. With floats, GPS-networks turn out to be equally expressive as GML with the counting global modality. The latter result is absolute, not restricting to properties definable in a background logic. We also obtain similar characterizations for GTs in terms of propositional logic with the global modality (for reals) and the counting global modality (for floats).

Expressive Power of Graph Transformers via Logic

Humans exhibit time-inconsistent behavior, in which planned actions diverge from executed actions. Understanding time inconsistency and designing appropriate interventions is a key research challenge in computer science and behavioral economics. Previous work focuses on progress-based tasks and derives a closed-form description of agent behavior, from which they obtain optimal intervention strategies. They model time-inconsistency using the $\beta$--$\delta$ discounting (quasi-hyperbolic discounting), but the analysis is limited to the case $\delta = 1$. In this paper, we relax that constraint and show that a closed-form description of agent behavior remains possible for the general case $0 < \delta \le 1$. Based on this result, we derive the conditions under which agents abandon tasks and develop efficient methods for computing optimal interventions. Our analysis reveals that agent behavior and optimal interventions depend critically on the value of $\delta$, suggesting that fixing $\delta = 1$ in many prior studies may unduly simplify real-world decision-making processes.

Delta Matters: An Analytically Tractable Model for beta–delta Discounting Agents

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are widely and successfully applied in the field of speaker recognition. However, recent studies reveal that these models are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where adversaries inject malicious behaviors into victim models by poisoning the training process. Existing attack methods often rely on environmental noise or complex voice transformations, which are typically difficult to implement and exhibit poor stealthiness. To address these issues, this paper proposes two modulation-based backdoor attacks that leverage frequency modulation (FM) and amplitude modulation (AM) to construct audio triggers. In real-world scenarios, regular variations in frequency and amplitude are often imperceptible to human listeners, making the proposed attacks more covert. Experimental results show that our methods achieve high attack success rates in both digital and physical settings, while also demonstrating strong resistance to various state-of-the-art backdoor defenses. The code for reproducing main experiments is available at https://github.com/HanboCai/FSMA_ASMA.

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